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"Lares Vegas" from El Gallo Bueno
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With a little help from Duke Ellington and jon Bon Jovi, Abraham Gomez-Delgado tapped into his Latin roots and reinvented salsa music. 

BY BOB GENOVESI

"It was so cold!" Remembers salsa musician Abraham Gomez-Delgado with a shudder.  When Gomez-Delgado was seven, his family moved from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to rural Massachusetts, where his mother had just landed a job as a social worker. 

He hated it.  A new language, new weather, new music - Massachusetts offered a blast of northern culture shock that traumatized the young Gomez-Delgado.  But today he says the turmoil set him on a path toward the arts and ultimately laid the foundation for Zemog, El Gallo Bueno, his seven-peice avant-garde fusion-salsa band.  The group has just released a self-titled debut CD full of sparkling Latin rhythms, inventive horn arrangements. amd surprising infusions of everything from surf music to Sun Ra-inspired improvisation.  

Gomez-Delgado says that the biggest shock of his 1979 arrival in the States was not being accepted for who he was.  His tiny town seethed with racial tensions.  "Every day in the schoolyard it was 'Spic, spic, spic!'" he recalls.  "And if I slipped and spoke spanish, I'd be in a fight."  Out of self-protection, Gomez-Delgado spoke no spanish for two years, even at home, and rejected salsa music of his parents, instead embracing the heavy metal and hard-rock favorites of the time:  Mötley Crüe, Iron Maiden, Bon Jovi.   

He also took refuge in art and in his imagination.  "I didn't have any friends, so I'd go out in the woods and play with rocks," he laughs.  But a turning point came one day in class when he idly drew a tree in his notebook.  "The kid sitting next to me saw it and said 'Wow, that's cool , man!  Look, he can draw a tree!'  I thought, Hey, art can do stuff for you!  And that I just started drawing, drawing, drawing.  It became a way to bridge the gap" with his once hostile classmates.  

Gomez-Delgado still felt like an outsider, but he began to celebrate his outsiderness.  "Through art - painting, and later on, music - I felt I could be myself completely: I'm part American, part Peurto Rican, part Peruvian, a painter, a Duke Ellington fan, and a heavy-metal lover.  I try to incorporate all of that."

That was the game plan for Zemog, El Gallo Bueno (the name translates as Zemog, The Good Rooster), which grew out of a weekly jam session that Gomez-Delgado led at Cambridge's Green Street Grill.  A core group of musicians kept returning each week to play with him - among them some of the cream of Bostons's jazz and Latin scenes. "We basically created the group onstage and had our rehersal before an audience," he says.  The final lineup included Gomez-Delgado on guitar, vocals, and congas along with other players on bass, cornet, trombone, baritone sax, guitar, drums, and timbales.  

At first listen, the band's debut CD sounds like straight-ahead, exuberant salsa party music, but you soon realize why this salsa band plays punk-rock clubs.  On the first song, "Animate," conga and timbale rhythms perculate as horns propel the dance beats along, all these sounds intertwining with Gomez-Delgado's spanish lyrics.  But, subtly layered underneath, a guitar chops away at a distinct Jamaican ska rhythm.  The arrangements then move on to Ellingtonian horn flourishes, sections of 1960s-style free jazz, and echoes of alternative rock and heavy-metal.  

What's refreshing about the band is that it doesn't sound contrived, as world-fusion expirenments often do.  The outré elements have been incorporated from the ground up, drawing on the attitudes of the disparate genres as much as on the sounds.  Gomez-Delgado says the approach simply extends a tradition of salsa music, which has always been an amalgamation of diverse elements:  The music was based on Cuban styles but developed by Puerto Ricans living in New York, who added their own traditions and plenty of jazz to the mix.  "But the additions are always done with respect." he points out.  "I'm an immigrant.  I still love and keep where I come from, but I can't be ashamed of where I am.  I have to combine that, and love all of that. And, hopefully, make that the new tradition."

BOB GENOVESI IS A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF BODY & SOUL 03/01/03
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